As continuous delivery becomes integral to an organization’s ability to deliver software rapidly and reliably the practice is expanding from just a few forward thinking groups to multiple teams. Additionally it extends the focus of IT tooling and process beyond IT into departments across the whole organization. This, coupled with the fact that today’s customers expectation that businesses are continuously innovating, has created the need for organizations to adopt self-hosted, managed, continuous delivery as a service.
Benefits of Continuous Delivery
1.Deliver software with fewer bugs and lower risk.
When you release smaller changes more frequently, you catch errors much earlier in the development process. When you implement automated testing at every stage of development, you don’t pass failed code to the next stage. And it’s easier to roll back smaller changes when you need to.
2. Release new features to market more frequently and learn.
Releasing new features early and often — even in a minimally viable state — means you get more frequent feedback, giving you the ability to iterate and learn from your customers. Enlisting customers as development partners gives them a sense of co-ownership and loyalty, and makes them more likely to forgive when you stumble.
3. Respond to marketing conditions more quickly.
Market conditions change constantly. Whether you’ve just discovered a new product is losing money, or that more customers are visiting your site from smart phones than laptops, it’s much easier to make a fast change if you are already practicing continuous delivery.
Continuous delivery means the responsibility for software delivery is distributed much more widely, and this shared responsibility and collaboration make life better. Continuous delivery also take a lot of stress out of software release. Releasing smaller changes more often gets everyone used to a regular, predictable pace, leaving room to come up with ideas and actually enjoy your the work. Best of all, a successful release becomes a shared success, one you can all celebrate together.
How Cotocus will help you in Implementation of Continous Delivery?
Speed: You get faster delivery of the most important improvements and fixes. You can release some changes in hours or days. When you fix problems faster, your system will have fewer bugs. You can accelerate delivery of a few great improvements, learn fast, and beat the competition.
Quality: I am often asked: "Does continuous delivery require me to release more quickly, with lower quality? Will I be releasing more bugs, and features with less refined usability?" Actually, continuous delivery gives you extra capacity that you can use to improve either speed or quality. You can choose to release faster, or you can choose to hold features longer before releasing and "unveiling" them, to move them to higher quality and usability. At Assembla, we found that our feature delivery got slower when we improved the usability of our software. Continuous delivery also results in systems with fewer bugs at any given time, because bugs are discovered and fixed faster.
Capacity and Scale: You can include a bigger, more scalable development team in a continuous process. Batch processes like iteration planning, release planning, and release testing become exponentially harder to organize as you involve an increasing number of people. With continuous delivery, we solve this problem by skipping batch processes. With the code contribution workflows listed here, you can manage code and not people, and accept the code that is ready. Code is easier to manage. You can organize thousands of people and hundreds of systems with continuous delivery. Also, you can work with an entire world of talent, because you can manage distributed teams effectively.
Cost: You spend less money and time on meetings and management. If you eliminate batch processes you don't need as many big, expensive meetings.
Focus: Team members have more time to think. Developers can completely finish and release a task before they move to the next task. They do not need to switch their brains and their configurations between tasks. Product managers and QA people also get this benefit.
Clarity: Your team should experience less stress. With continuous delivery, you fix small problems quickly. Bigger changes take only as long as the work requires, because they are not delayed by stops and starts. You have fewer high-pressure spikes of release work. You can think about one thing at a time. All of these factors lower stress so that you can have a better life and work more effectively.
How we will implement Continuous Delivery
Select a Project to Start
A common mistake organizations make is trying to do too much too soon. CD enthusiasts believe in the methodology, and they tends to want to generate big gains quickly to justify the organization’s commitment. So they go for broke and try to tackle a complicated project, with many twists and turns. The “big bang” approach promises big payoffs, but it tends to create big problems.
A better way is to start with a project, that lets the organization try out CD and get used to the new procedures. Try to pick a new area with new delivery expectations that isn’t tied to a legacy pipeline and an old set of procedures. Small, incremental changes to applications are easier to test and easier to remedy if something goes wrong. Each change can be pushed through a pipeline more quickly, allowing organizations to do shorter, faster pipeline runs that can produce measureable, positive results.
Define a Process
Once will pick your initial project, we’ll define the process. This is as simple as writing the procedures on a board. The first step is to get each staffer to write out steps in the delivery process on a whiteboard and think about how to link them, creating an assembly line process. The team then rolled up their collective sleeves, created a workflow and automated it.
The fact is, you can buy a great set of tools, create an aggressive set of goals and get your team to buy in. But until you map out a process, understand the process and assign roles, you can’t get started.
Ensure a Blameless Culture
One prerequisite to a CD implementation is a requirement that the development, QA and operations teams need to have shared goals. That’s essential. But it’s not the end of the “people work.” As you implement CD, you should do an ongoing check that you’re truly promoting a blameless culture. Issues will crop up in any CD implementation, and your organization needs to ensure that it can triage them in a positive way without having people point fingers at each other. Successful DevOps cultures accept failure and promote risk-taking. Moving to CD is a risk, and your team needs to keep its head in the game to continuously improve your processes.
Set Metrics and Measure Your Success
The fact is, you can’t improve if you don’t measure early and often. So, an important move as you embark on a continuous delivery journey is to decide what you want to improve and how you’re going to measure improvement. Then, you set a series of baseline measurements. And you’re off.
Adopt Configuration as Code
A key aspect of continuous delivery is the ability to automate your configuration. This configuration-as-code DevOps practice ensures consistency in your CD process, clearing away problems that could result from rebuilding your configuration potentially inconsistently every time you want to push a release to production.
We are implementing CD, we’ll want to make sure you’re taking advantage of tools that enable configuration management tools from Chef, Puppet and others. And we’re seeing more DevOps operations implement these tools.
Cotocus Offer for Continous Delivery
Training – presents an in-depth guide to the principles and practices behind continuous delivery along with case studies from real companies and ideas to help you adopt continuous delivery within your organization. You’ll start by learning the value proposition and the foundations. These lessons cover change management, agile infrastructure management, managing databases, architecture, and the patterns that enable low-risk releases. They conclude by discussing the culture and organizational change patterns of high performing companies. After taking this training, you will understand not just the principles and practices that enable continuous delivery and devops, but also how they are implemented in high performing organizations. With this knowledge you’ll be ready to transform your organization’s software delivery capability to get high quality solutions to market fast, while reducing the risk of the release process.
Consulting – Cotocus consulting services are designed to guide organizations to a model of continuous delivery. This approach allows our customers to get software into their users’ hands more frequently and reliably by fully automating their applications deployment pipelines. While continuous delivery is the organizing concept around our DevOps services, it is not an end state.
Our goal is to equip our customers with the technical skills, battle tested processes, and tools needed to embrace nonstop delivery improvement. In the end, our customers are able to measure this improvement in two specific ways: reduced cycle time and improved product quality